1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computers and, more particularly, to techniques for dynamically generating persona.
2. Description of the Background Art
Interacting with internet sites or service providers often involves disclosing some personal information. Users often desire to only disclose the minimal information required to interact with a given site or service provider. How a given site or service provider is known to use the information supplied by a user, their reputation, can also affect how much personal information a user may wish to provide to the given site or service provider. In some cases, users may desire to limit how information given to one site or service provider is tied to information given to other sites or service providers by giving each site or service provider different user identities to prevent identity correlation between the sites and/or service providers.
A lot of effort can be expended to generate and store different sets of user identity information such as user names, passwords, e-mail addresses and the like. The practice of creating multiple sets of user identities is known as creating different persona. Some users may become frustrated with the required record keeping associated with having multiple persona.
There may also be confusion surrounding the minimum required personal identity data set each persona must include to satisfy a particular site or service provider identity policy requirement. For example, two different sites may each ask a user to supply the same personal data prior to the user gaining access to the site content. Even though both sites ask for the same personal data, one site may only require a unique user name and password while the other site may require additional information such as a home address, social security number, and the like. Neither site may identify what the minimum required identity data set needs to be, so the user can be left to guess.
Some service providers use identity management protocols such as the software distributed under the trademarks CARDSPACE and OPEN ID. CARDSPACE and OPEN ID allow users to provide their digital persona in a familiar, secure, and easy manner. Using identity management protocols allows users to create a variety of persona to electronically identify themselves to service providers.
A single user may have multiple persona. For example, a user may have a work persona, a personal persona, an internet relay chat (irc) persona, a gaming persona, and the like. One reason persona are used is to limit information correlation between sites, groups of sites, or service providers. In other words, it is hard to connect the activities of a user who has a work persona having an e-mail address of BobSmith@abccompany.com and a gaming persona with a gaming screen name of “ClownOverlord.” Even though these persona come from the same person, as long as the user consistently uses each persona for work and gaming respectively, there identity should be more secure than if they used the same persona for each activity. While there may be a need for legal recourse to trace both persona to the same entity, for most interaction purposes the use of persona is accepted and justified. It should be understood that many service providers employ multiple internet sites and use these multiple sites to correlate user information. It can therefore be important for users to use different persona with various sites even though the sites may be owned by, managed by, or share data with the same service provider.
While persona do in general solve the problem of information correlation and/or keeping a given user identity private, again it is not easy to create multiple persona. Minimally, it takes the effort to manually enter the information into a given identity management protocol for each given site. If the user is required to provide more than a user name and password to the site, for example information such as phone number, shipping address, or other out-of-band data, the user may also need to provide this information.
Additionally, the user often lacks information about the reputation of a particular site or service provider. Without access to the reputation information of a site, the user may have to guess what identity information they need to provide to a site to protect their real identity. For example, the user may wonder if it is acceptable to supply a work e-mail address to a given site or will that site start sending spam to the work address or sell the address to other spammers? These problems inhibit the use of persona.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus that facilitates effective use of persona.